NASA would take over authority for acquiring NOAA’s weather satellites. Solar energy funding would be cut in favor of new R&D for oil shale resources. Highway and airport investments are largely frozen while $152 million added for community development block grants.

The decisions kept piling up Tuesday as the House and Senate Appropriations Committees began rolling out the first of their 2013 spending bills. But where it all ends, no one knows given the breakdown in the August debt accords that once promised some return to normalcy this summer.

Instead of one track, the committees must travel two, destined to collide in September when a stopgap spending resolution will be needed to avert another government shutdown Oct. 1. Thus Tuesday’s rituals had some of the feel of opening day in the baseball season, when two doomed teams take heart from the green grass and warm sun and try to convince themselves that an early start will change their luck.

Don’t count on it.

The Republican-backed budget resolution in the House breaks with the appropriations targets set last summer, cutting $19 billion from total discretionary spending for 2013 and also changing the makeup to favor defense over domestic priorities.

The real gap is a more than $27 billion drop from what Democrats and the White House had anticipated for non-defense programs — a hard nut to crack in any circumstances, let alone an election year.

That said, the committees can tack in the sea of numbers around them.

The first bill outlined Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee was a $32.1 billion energy and water measure that is over 2012 funding — not under. The Senate Appropriations panel then rolled out two of its own, each under 2012 funding, not over.

The first was a $51.86 billion measure funding the Departments of Justice and Commerce as well as major science and space agencies. Total new spending would be about $1 billion less than current levels, and one of the bolder steps includes a plan to save an estimated $117 million by reassigning the management of weather satellite acquisition to NASA.

The decision is sure to be controversial but reflects a growing impatience with the cost overruns experienced under NOAA, which would continue to operate the satellites. And the two Senate managers of the bill, Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), bring a history of favoring the space agency.

“NOAA does not have that capability,” Mikulski said of the trouble acquisition process. “The best agency to do that is NASA.”

The second Senate bill, covering transportation and housing programs, provides $105.5 billion in total resources split between $53.4 billion in discretionary funds and the remainder largely from trust funds for highway, transit and airport projects.

The total is about $4 billion under current 2012 spending but within these limits, the bill protects passenger rail and community development grants.

In the case of the House energy and water bill, the increase over 2012 is marginal: about $88 million and owed really to the increased funding for nuclear security programs in the package.

But the real cut from non-defense priorities is less than the budget numbers would have suggested. For example, $4.8 billion is provided for science research in the Energy Department, a reduction of just $167 million from Obama’s request.

Elsewhere, Republicans do take an ax to some of the president’s energy efficiency initiatives, especially solar and investments in building technologies. An estimated $155 million is allocated for solar, for example — half the president’s request. In the case of building technologies, the bill provides $125 million, $185 million below Obama’s budget.

Nonetheless, the total resources provided by the bill are just about 3 percent under the president’s request. And when the House committee unveils its Commerce, Justice and Science budget Wednesday, it is expected to be within about $730 million of the Senate version outlined Tuesday.